- Daniel Abebe, Assistant Professor of Law: The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs. Disraeli. Though the book is a work of non-fiction, the author’s narrative and rich writing style brought Gladstone and Disraeli to life, almost reading as a great fictional historical drama.
- Douglas Baird, Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law: On my vacation, I read Michael Dobbs, One Minute to Midnight: Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro on the Brink of Nuclear War. It is a gripping minute-by-minute account of the Cuban Missile Crisis that takes advantage of archival materials from the United States and Russia that have only come to light recently. It shows both how close we came to a nuclear Armageddon and what leadership skills—and outright luck—kept us away from it."
- Omri Ben-Shahar, Frank and Bernice J. Greenberg Professor of Law: A Tale of Love and Darkness, by Amos Oz, which I love because it captures the realism and surrealism of Israeli existence, told in a style that is completely original, and does wonders with the Hebrew language. I am told by non-Israelis that it is a captivating book also in other languages.
Spring 2009 Law School Book Club selection! To learn more, please contact Jessica Block at jblock@uchicago.edu.
- Anu Bradford, Assistant Professor of Law: I would recommend the book by Fareed Zakaria: The Post-American World and another by Parag Khanna: The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order. Both books offer thoughtful insights in the ongoing shifts in the balance of power that reshape the international order. They provoke discussions on the opportunities and challenges that America faces as its relative power declines and as it adapts to an increasingly multi-polar world. These books and the discussion surrounding them inspired me to offer a seminar "The New Economic Order in the Post-American World" this winter.
- Emily Buss, Mark and Barbara Fried Professor of Law and Kanter Director of Chicago Policy Initiatives: To Kill a Mockingbird—I reread it this spring to keep up with my 8th grader. The movie is great, but the book is much better. Racial injustice, gender roles, class, and the interrelationship among individuals in a small southern town in the 30s are all seen through the eyes of a young girl.
- Kenneth Dam, Max Pam Professor Emeritus of American & Foreign Law and Senior Lecturer: Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Random House 2007). The Financial Times choice as the best business book of 2007. Written by an egotistical but savvy quantitative hedge fund type of trader who knows statistics backward and forward, the book is a powerful indictment of conventional ways of using statistics in financial matters, including the use of standard economics quantitative methods by University of Chicago finance types (e.g., Myron Scholes, who used to be at the U. of C. Graduate School of Business and who is the "Scholes" in the Black-Scholes option pricing formula).
- Rosalind Dixon, Assistant Professor of Law: His Illegal Self by Peter Carey (it combines some of the places I know best: Cambridge, MA and remote Australia).
- Frank Easterbrook, Senior Lecturer in Law: Mozart's Women: His Family, His Friends, His Music, by Jane Glover, is a look at the social life of a genius in relation to its music. There is a Chicago connection: Glover is Music Director of Chicago's Music of the Baroque, a wonderful ensemble that everyone should experience. And the book has nothing to do with law. Writing is a lawyer's stock in trade, and the best way to learn how to write well is to read well-written literature.
- Tom Ginsburg, Professor of Law: This summer I am doing research in Taipei, Seoul and Tokyo. I just finished Peter Duus, The Abacus and the Sword: The Japanese Penetration of Korea 1895-1910 (California 1995), a book on Japanese colonialism. A subtext of the book is the clash of two views of the international system, a European view of international law based on formal equality of states, and an older view associated with the Chinese tributary system. China and Korea held on to the old view, to their detriment, while Japan adopted the Western view quickly and used it to perpetuate the colonial project. I've also recently and belatedly read Mark West's Law in Everyday Japan: Sex, Sumo, Suicide and Statutes (Chicago 2005), a wonderful book on Japanese law. West conducts interesting empirical studies on various aspects of Japanese life (including those listed in the subtitle) to show how law matters there.
- Todd Henderson, Assistant Professor of Law: The Hakawati -- a magical journey in the modern and ancient Middle East. (Maybe I like this book just because I'm Lebanese.) Also, The Drunkard's Walk -- an endlessly fascinating exploration of probability, statistics, and the meaning of luck.
- Mark Heyrman, Clinical Professor of Law: I am reading The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie, a beautifully written novel filled with insights about religion, culture, war and myth.
- Alison LaCroix, Assistant Professor of Law: Old Filth by Jane Gardam -- a novel with the 20th-century British Empire as the background for the life of an English barrister (the "Old Filth" of the title, said to stand for "Failed in London, Try Hong Kong"). Literary and suspenseful, too.
- Brian Leiter, John P. Wilson Professor of Law and Director, Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values: I had read some of Richard Posner's How Judges Think in draft last year, but have resumed reading the book now that it has appeared. Every member of the United States Senate should read it, so that we might have meaningful confirmation hearings on federal judges. Our public discourse about what judges really do proceeds at an infantile level; Judge Posner's bracing book could help it grow up. His criticisms of the self-serving and often delusional rhetoric of current members of the U.S. Supreme Court is especially welcome. Completely unrelated, I have been reading Robert Service's Stalin: A Biography. The book has something of the appeal of a ‘true crime’ story, except the crimes are on a much more dramatic scale, and the character of the perpetrator much more complex and interesting than usually supposed. Stalin's world in which he was a young agitator in (what became Soviet) Georgia in the early 20th-century is one wholly foreign to ours, making Service's portrait all the more remarkable. Service is not, alas, a sophisticated practitioner of armchair psychology, but his portrait of Stalin, one of the monumental figures of the 20th-century, is fascinating nonetheless.
- Saul Levmore, Dean and William B. Graham Professor of Law: I am listening to The Coldest Winter just now, David Halberstam’s telling of the Korean War. I think it has been the war in Iraq that made me realize how ignorant I was of other, important wars. Earlier this summer, I started on this path with A Savage War of Peace, by Alistair Horne, on the French-Algerian War. A fun book I just finished is Michael Gruber’s The Forgery of Venus, though perhaps we are not supposed to confess reading junk books. If so, I can recommend instead Anthony Trollope’s Doctor Thorne. I had never read a single Trollope novel until last year. He is just terrific at describing class tensions and people in politics in his era. You can see how I need rules. I try to alternate old and new, fiction and nonfiction. I also started reading on my Kindle this summer. I loved Ann Patchett’s Run, though someone who has not met her work should begin with Bel Canto.
- Jonathan Masur, Assistant Professor of Law: I’m currently reading Robert Caro’s Master of the Senate, the third in his three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. The book covers Johnson’s years in the Senate (1949-1960) in painstaking detail, describing everything from his greatest legislative victories to his minor tussles over office space and staff. What’s fascinating about the work is the way in which it demonstrates that no single factor, personal or political, can explain the rise of an historical figure of Johnson’s significance. Johnson’s unparalleled success in the Senate would not have been possible but for a combination of overwhelming personal ability, historical trends (over which he exerted no control), and simple blind luck; without a few crucial breaks, even Johnson -- maybe as talented a politician as has ever lived -- would have seen his career languish. The book thus provides ample ammunition for fans of both "great person" and social environment theories of history without truly satisfying either.
- Martha Nussbaum, Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics: Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), Jerusalem, 1783. Mendelssohn was the leading philosopher of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Jerusalem is one of the most significant works about the relationship between religion and the state in the European tradition of political philosophy, but it is rarely read as such, because it has (rather irritatingly and condescendingly) been defined as a part of the history of Jewish thought only -- despite the fact that Mendelssohn engages with the arguments of Hobbes and Locke, and conducted a correspondence with Kant about the nature of rational religion. Mendelssohn attempts two different projects in the book: first, he advances a new account of the complex interrelationships among individual liberty, state power, and the entitlements of religious communities, arguing for broad toleration for minority speech and religious conduct. He improves on Locke's account in many respects (particularly by recognizing that individual freedom is at risk from religious organizations as well as from the state). Second, he offers an account of Judaism as a religion based upon respect for each person's rational autonomy. Particularly interesting is Mendelssohn's claim that an established church makes us "unrecognizable to one another" by removing difference and disagreement about ultimate values, so clearly a hallmark of our humanity.
- Alison Siegler, Assistant Clinical Professor of Law: The best book I’ve read lately was The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Diaz has a unique way of jumbling together soaring intellectualism and street talk, sci-fi nerdiness and Spanglish, literary references and profanities. But the best part is that he can tell a more compelling story in a few sentences than some authors can tell in a whole book. He drops these breathtaking and often-hysterical David Foster Wallace-esque footnotes, some of which vividly describe brutal events in Dominican history, and he manages to connect the story of Oscar and his family to the story of an entire country and an entire people.
- Geoffrey Stone, Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor: I am currently reading Thurston Clark's The Last Campaign: Robert F. Kennedy and the 82 Days that Inspired America. Because I am still reading it, I'm reluctant to recommend it. But from what I've read so far (the first third), I would say it's a terrific read -- lively, insightful, and intensely interesting. This is the 40th anniversary of 1968, and reading this book is a fine way either to remember or to learn about that extraordinary year. For many people of that era -- the year I entered the University of Chicago Law School as a student -- RFK's campaign for president, ending in his tragic assassination, was a watershed moment in the history of our nation.
- David Weisbach, Walter J. Blum Professor of Law and Kearney Director of the Program in Law and Economics: I just read William Easterly’s White Man’s Burden. Worth a read for anyone interesting in working on issues related to development and poverty.
- Maria Woltjen, Director of the Immigrant Children's Advocacy Project and Lecturer in Law: I loved When the Emperor was Divine by Julie Otsuka, a first novel about a Japanese family in California during World War II – this book resonates given these times of increased immigration enforcement (see Postville, New Bedford).